Which of these four different grey levers is the safety lever on this FN57 pistol? And is it currently set to safe or to fire? (Answer at end of article)

One of the concepts popularized by the revolutionary Glock 17 pistol when it was first released in 1982 was that the pistol had no separate dedicated safety lever.  Perhaps because of this, Glock made – and still does make – a big thing of its three different safety devices built into its pistols, which basically mean that if the trigger isn’t pulled, the gun won’t shoot.

Not quite so proudly stated is that if the trigger is pulled – whether by your trigger or possibly by virtue of being caught on something that pushes against the trigger, then the gun will shoot without further ado.

While this was a new concept for a mass-market full-sized semi-auto pistol, it was far from a unique or novel concept overall.  Most revolvers do not have a safety lever on them, and plenty of sub-compact type semi-auto pistols are offered without safety levers too.

But isn’t a safety lever, well – as its name implies?  A safety feature, and something that should be expected and used?

Some people have embraced the concept of a gun without a separate safety lever.  Others have shunned it.  Which is the more correct attitude?

Here are some arguments sometimes put forward both pro and con.  I’ll list the arguments first, then discuss them second.

Advantages of No Gun Safety

• A gun without a safety is easier to learn.  You don’t have to all the time be fussing about if the safety is on or off.
• A gun without a safety is quicker to get into action.  It is one less step to perform under duress – if all you have to go is grab your gun, point it, and start pulling the trigger, that is a lot easier than grabbing, pointing, checking and changing the safety’s state as needed, then pulling.
• A gun without a safety is simpler and has one less thing to go wrong.  What if the safety gets stuck or in some other way breaks and prevents the gun from firing at a critical time?
• A gun without a safety is a gun you are forced to treat with greater care and respect, because you know that the only thing preventing the gun from discharging is your careful handling.
• A gun does not need  a safety – it is designed to shoot rather than to not shoot, and the biggest/bestest safety is the behavior of the person handling the gun.

Advantages of a Gun with a Safety

• A gun with a safety has one more layer of protection.  Sure, in perfect theory, safeties would never be required, but in the imperfect real world, mistakes and accidents can and do occur, and an additional separate safety lever might prevent an accidental discharge from occurring.
• If your gun is taken from you, and if it has its safety on, you might have a valuable extra few seconds of time to save yourself before your gun is used against you.
• A safety makes it possible to carry, eg, a 1911 type pistol ‘cocked and locked’.
• A gun is a lethal weapon.  You can’t take back a bullet once you’ve fired it.  Adding a safety is not just common sense and prudent, it is as essential as are having seat belts and air bags in a car.

So Are Safeties Good?

Some of these reasons, both for and against safeties, are more compelling than others.  We’ve stated them here without comment, so you can think about them yourself, and decide what to do that best suits your own situation.

But if you’d like some comments and thoughts, please do continue reading.

Talking first about the advantages of a gun without an additional separate safety lever, we do agree and accept that such a gun may be very slightly quicker to get into action, and maybe 0.001% more reliable than a well designed gun complete with a safety lever function.

As for guns being more dangerous or more safe, with or without a safety (and notice the curious but valid suggestion that a gun with no safety could be safer because people know they always must treat it as dangerous, whereas if a gun has a safety, sooner or later a person will rely on the safety and do something stupid with the gun, and the safety will fail to prevent a tragedy from following) the difference in safety is minimal and much less a factor than the degree of safety as a result of even some very basic gun handling training.

The training point is possibly the most valid.  As a trainer, one of the common problems I note with new students is they’ll many times get muddled and flick the safety on when it should be off, or vice versa, resulting in failed attempts to fire the pistol (due to the safety being incorrectly active) and possibly unsafe weapons (due to the safety not being set at a time when the gun’s owner thought it to be safed).

And – I’m embarrassed to say this – if I’m handed a weapon I’m unfamiliar with, I don’t necessarily instantly recognize the safety and understand if it is in a safe or ready position.  Some weapons have very counter-intuitive safeties and markings, and some weapons have safeties in very different positions to those on other weapons.

This isn’t such a big problem if you own and train consistently with only ever one style of weapon so you become familiar and skilled at setting its safety on and off.  But if you’re hoping to get proficiency in several different weapons, some with safeties at the rear, some with safeties in the middle, and some with safeties at the front of the weapon, you know that for sure, when you suddenly find yourself in a high stress situation and needing to quickly work your gun, there’s every good chance you’re going to fumble the ‘set safety off’ part of your getting ready to shoot steps.

But now let’s flip that around and consider it from an opposite perspective.

Perhaps the most convincing argument we’ve encountered for choosing a weapon with a safety is that it may slow down the time it takes for someone who has taken your gun from you to get it running.  This of course assumes that your weapon was taken from you with the safety set on – if the safety is already set off, then you’ll have no benefit at all, because most bad guys, after getting your gun from you, will point it at you and potentially pull the trigger without pausing to check anything.  Only after the trigger pull has failed to result in a shot being fired will they then pause to look at the gun and try to puzzle out what the problem is (think of the different scenarios – no round in chamber, out of ammo entirely, a jam of some sort, or the safety on).

Some studies have come up with what they claim to be the average number of seconds it takes an unskilled person to fire a pistol with the safety on.  I hesitate to cite those studies or their findings, because my sense is that the ‘average’ does not reflect a common likely to be experienced number of seconds that you can count on or anticipate.  If you’ve a standard 1911 type pistol, for example, and if the bad guy has a passing familiarity with 1911 pistols, having the safety on might buy you a second or less.  But if you’ve got one of the fancy new guns out there that seem to have more knobs and dials and switches on them than is reasonable, it could take the person a surprising amount of time and experimentation to end up getting the gun running.  Meanwhile, talking about running, that is probably what you’re doing, as fast as you can!

But for this to buy you any time, you’ve got to be very certain to always keep the safety on until you’re ready to fire.  This is good tactics, of course, but our sense is that many people, if confronting an intruder or potential intruder, will urgently take the safety off at the start of their weapon handling drills, rather than as the third to last step (followed by ‘finger on trigger’ and ‘squeeeeze’).  This is also true of after-action drills – the minute you’ve decided not to shoot, or to stop shooting, you need to go in reverse – ‘finger away from trigger’ and then ‘safety on’.

Phew – if you read through the last some paragraphs, perhaps they can be summarized as ‘a safety can be a useful enhancement to any gun, but if you choose to get a gun with a safety, you’ll need a great deal more training in order to be able to use it well’.

So?  The Bottom Line?

Safety or not?  What should you do?

There’s no absolutely universally right answer to this question.  Feel free to make your own choice either which way.  On balance, we slightly prefer guns without safeties.  But you know yourself, your competencies, and the scenarios in which you may be carrying and using your gun.

If there’s a danger of having the gun taken from you, then having an obscured safety lever is a great thing.  But if you want a dead simple ‘point and shoot’ gun that you’re not going to have to train to a higher level of competency with in order to be able to use it in an extreme situation, getting a gun without the addition of an external free-standing safety will make your life easier, and might also shave anything from 0.1 seconds and up off the time it takes to get the gun running in an emergency.

0.1 seconds?  It doesn’t sound like much, does it!  But an attacker running at you at full speed will cover a yard or more in that single one tenth of a second, and that could mean all the difference between a stand-off self-defense act on your part, and an ugly and unpredictable wrestling match where the first thing that goes away is your control of your gun.

A tenth of a second can literally mean the difference between life and death.  So maybe that ‘safety’ catch isn’t quite as safe as you thought.

Why Don’t Revolvers Have Safeties?

Most revolvers have no safeties on them.  Smith & Wesson, for a while, made their revolvers with a key lock, but this is not the same thing as a safety.  A safety is something that is designed to be conveniently activated and de-activated with the flip of a finger; a key lock is, well, clearly something very different.

The main reason that revolvers are usually found without a safety is due to how the trigger works.  A semi-auto pistol that is cocked can be fired by a very small trigger movement – perhaps as little as a tenth of an inch or so, and with very little pressure – perhaps only 2 or 3 pounds of pull on the trigger.  As such, a semi-auto is thought by some people to be more susceptible to being accidentally fired by having things bump the trigger – for example, a quite common scenario is some clothing catching on the gun when it is being reinserted into a belt holster, and tightening around the trigger, potentially causing the gun to fire.

A revolver on the other hand is normally carried in its ‘double action’ mode – ie, with the hammer resting forward rather than cocked back.  The trigger has to be pulled a long way backwards – maybe as much even as an inch of movement, and a great deal more pressure has to be applied to the trigger – usually appreciably more than ten pounds of trigger pull.

This means that both because of the long distance the trigger has to be pulled, and the strong pressure needed to be applied, it is much less likely for a revolver to be accidentally fired.

Hence – no additional safety.

Postscript :  Disabling – or Adding – a Safety

If you have a strong preference for having – or not having – a safety, you can of course disable an existing safety (a bit of Locktite or instant glue can ensure it stays in its unsafe/ready to fire setting), and you can also have gunsmiths add safeties to guns that lack them, out of the box.

We really don’t like the thought of disabling a safety.  It just feels like a bad thing that might come back to embarrass you – you can imagine a prosecutor thundering to the jury – ‘And the defendant was so reckless and so keen to shoot, that he even disabled the safety mechanism on the gun.  If only he had paused that extra second to take off the safety, he might have had time to reconsider his actions, and observed that the victim he shot had already surrendered to him, and posed no threat at all……’.  He might go on ‘Who is this defendant, that he knows more about gun design than the manufacturer?  Disabling the safety is as reckless as an AIDS infected person having unprotected casual sex….’.

You get the idea.

On the other hand, it is hard to criticize a person for adding an extra safety to a gun, making it more safe and harder to fire.  But when are you going to stop?  Adding one safety?  Two?  Five?  Ten?  If you’re so uncomfortable with a gun that doesn’t have a safety – particularly a gun like the Glock which is omnipresent and used by police departments and other law enforcement departments, as is, and as such is above criticism for being unduly dangerous – maybe you’re better advised to get a different model gun to start with.

Furthermore, while factory designed and installed safeties tend to be reliable, after-market add-on safeties are an unknown quantity that add another degree of complexity to your gun and another chance for something to go wrong.

We urge you never to modify a gun unless it is absolutely essential, because any modification you do can be twisted and turned and used against you in a court of law.

We have some guns we like, but with safeties we don’t like – safeties that are difficult to reach and difficult to move (for example, on a Browning Hi-Power, a gun which often has a very stiff safety lever).  We said before that switching a safety off (or on) might take as little as 0.1 seconds.  But some safeties will take you more like 0.5 seconds or even longer, and if even 0.1 seconds can change the outcome of an encounter, you can guess at how game-changing a 1.0 second extra time factor can be.

We simply leave the safety off, permanently, in such cases, and have downgraded such guns so they are no longer our normal carry/work guns.

Answer to the Question in the Picture Caption

We asked which of the four grey controls on the FN Herstal 57 pistol was the safety.  You probably managed to work out the answer yourself, but in the dark, under stress, if you were a bad guy and the gun didn’t shoot, what would you do first?  A challenge, for sure.

The four controls are :

1. Forward most is the takedown lever for field stripping
2. The middle lever is – (did you guess correctly?) – the safety.  Currently it is in the up or safe position.  If rotated anti-clockwise/down, it would move to the ready position, and expose a small red dot to indicate its status.
3. The rear lever is the slide lock.
4. The level at the rear of the trigger guard is the magazine release.

Both the safety and the magazine release are duplicated on the other side of the gun too, giving the bad guy a total of six controls to worry about.

And the FN 57 has one other feature as well – a feature we’ll write about separately.  A magazine safety.  If the magazine is missing, or even if it is just not fully seated, an interlock lever prevents the gun from firing.  So if the bad guy is succeeding in grabbing your FN 57, hit the magazine release, and even if there’s already a round in the chamber and the gun cocked, ready to fire, it will be fully inert until a magazine is correctly inserted and fully seated.

Buckshot from a shotgun will penetrate about half a dozen sheets of drywall

There are two distinctive things about firearms and the people who profess to know lots about them.

The first thing is there’s a terrible amount of misinformation and misunderstanding out there – no doubt exacerbated by what we see in the movies (people thrown backwards a considerable distance after getting hit by a pistol bullet, and ‘six shooter’ revolvers that seem to never need reloading, for just two examples).

The second thing is that some of these people who are not necessarily fully correct about what they may tell you – often people who on the face of it should know better – are very adamant about their views, whether they are supported by facts or not.

The most dangerous misunderstandings of course are those which start from a factual point and then move far beyond that, making it difficult to tell where certain reality ends and uncertain ambiguity takes over.  From this perspective, let’s consider some often cited ‘facts’ about shotguns.

The shotgun is a weapon which is sometimes given more credit than it is due.  By way of specific example, here’s a newspaper report of a horrific sounding home invasion in an upmarket town in Connecticut.  The result of this is that local people are rushing to buy firearms, and it seems that most people are buying shotguns.

There are two reasons why these people are buying shotguns.  The first is that you can walk out of the gun store with a shotgun minutes after purchasing it, whereas it seems that buying a handgun in CT is a much more difficult and time-consuming experience, sometimes requiring you to wait patiently for as long as 3 months or more.

The second reason seems to be that the local gun store owner is recommending shotguns – he is semi-quoted in the article (and we confirmed with the reporter) as saying that shotguns are excellent for home defense because they are maneuverable and when you are shooting one, they are unlikely to shoot through walls.

Unfortunately, we can’t agree with either of these statements.  Let’s consider maneuverability first.

By law, a shotgun must have at least an 18″ barrel and an overall length of at least 26″.  A typical shotgun (eg a Mossberg 500 or a Remington 870) weighs about 6.5 lbs.  Compare that to a pistol which might have a barrel as short as 2″, an overall length of as little as 4″, and a weight of little more than half a pound.  A shotgun is 6+ times longer and 12+ times heavier.  Of course this makes it much harder to carry, and to sneak around corners and confined spaces in your house with, compared to a pistol.  At the typically very close ranges in which home encounters occur, you run an appreciable risk of having the bad guy(s) wrestle the shotgun out of your hands.

And how about shotgun rounds not going through walls?  We can’t agree with the store owner about that, either.  Here’s an excellent article (which we took our opening picture from) that shows how buckshot will penetrate through not just one or two but half a dozen sheets of dry wall.

On the other hand, if you were thinking you’d load your shotgun with birdshot rather than buckshot, while you solve the problem of shooting through walls, you create a new problem – something that isn’t powerful enough to shoot through a wall is probably not powerful enough to shoot sufficiently into an up close and aggressive attacker.  This is commented on at the bottom of the recommended article, with the easily understood conclusion that if you’re shooting at birds, then by all means use birdshot, but if you’re shooting at larger animals, you must use buckshot (or solid slugs).

Can we also comment on one other misperception about shotguns, even though it is not referred to in the newspaper report.  Some people think that a shotgun is a better home defense weapon because the spread of the shot is such as to compensate for any errors in your aim.

Alas, this is not true, either.  At typical home defense distances (probably ranging from somewhere under 10 ft at a minimum and up to 20 ft as a maximum) the spread of shot (assuming a ‘best case’ scenario with a short barrel that has no choke on it) is unlikely to be more than perhaps a 4″ diameter circle at the 20′ point, and correspondingly less at shorter distances.  That’s not quite the same as being able to simply close your eyes, point the shotgun in the general direction of where you think you heard/saw the bad guy, pull the trigger, and be assured of an effective hit, is it!

Don’t get us wrong.  A shotgun can be an excellent weapon for home defense, and perhaps its greatest strength is its intimidation factor.  There’s nothing more likely to take the fight out of an aggressor than the sound of a pump action shotgun being confidently racked.  The good thing about this is that a shotgun could save you from needing to use deadly force, because, let’s face it – if the bad guy turns around and runs away, the threat has been removed, and while he might ‘escape’ that should no longer be your concern.  You’ve successfully defended yourself, your loved ones, and your home, and best of all, have done so without needing to use deadly force.  That’s about as good as it gets, isn’t it.

So – shotguns are good, but they have no magical powers.  They won’t snake sinuously around corners for you, they will shoot through walls, and they won’t compensate for bad aiming.

For More Reading

Please also see our article ‘The Maximum Effective Range of a Shotgun‘ for more discussion on Shotgun facts and fallacies.